


Lovesongs

by Hierophant



Series: paradise lost [2]
Category: Devilman (Anime & Manga), Devilman Crybaby - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, M/M, T for lowkey violence and gore, implication of time-loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 13:43:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13502714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hierophant/pseuds/Hierophant
Summary: Our state cannot be severed, we are one,One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.(Akira falls out of love.)





	Lovesongs

**Author's Note:**

> What if the only thing that defines us abandons us?  
> Akira falls in love because time tells him to.

— _Hey! What are you doing in the water? You okay?_

_Akira found a boy by the sea when he was very young. An undeniable curiosity had propelled him to the seaside that day, and when he found Ryo, he felt both surprise and an inexplicable sense of relief.  The boy was paddling to stay afloat but made no attempt to reach land. His simply floated a few feet from land, his body pushed to and fro gently by the water like an anchored ship. There was a blank look on his face; he seemed as if he had been there for a long time. Even though he must’ve been freezing, he did not shiver or ask for help. Beads of water hung about the ends of his clumped hair; the corners of his eyes, slightly upturned, gave him a sly air._

— _Here, take my hand! Akira yelled._

_There were waves in his eyes. He looked at Akira. Akira was absorbed by that gaze, and a feeling of divine understanding pierced him._

— _I’d be sad if I ever lost him, he thought to himself. Just then, there were waves in his eyes, too._

 

It was love at first sight, Akira was sure. Meeting Ryo gave rise to a sensation that seemed so old as to exceed Akira’s understanding and time; from this he found a wild, raw joy, a firm belief that they were bounded by fate. This conviction only grew with time and became an understanding that his younger self called magnetism—the same sort of force that bound molecules and ions together, the grand unified theory—an instinct as primal and ingrained as to be animal. He was a being that was made to love Ryo just as he loved people.

_They were five. Ryo’s narrow back, shaped like some kind of fish Akira saw in a picture book, was in view—there was just a short stretch of ground between them now. He wasn’t looking; when Akira passed the baton to him, it missed his open palm. It hit the ground on one end, bounced, flipped, and hit the ground again. Watching it roll away, he felt sadness that was incomprehensible for his age._

— _Sorry, Akira, Ryo said, sticking his small pink tongue out. He left the following summer, after promising Akira that he’d never leave._

 

He still saw Ryo’s lustre everywhere when he was gone. He saw it in the Makimura house, with its potted plants sitting under the slanted skylight; he saw it in the shifting shadows of trees playing on the ground; he saw it on the track field, too, when the summer heat bent vision of the ground into waves, and his own sweat glistened under the sun.

_He was sixteen, now. His hands formed pyramids at the starting line._

_On your marks, get set…_

_Go! He sprinted forward, one outstretched leg overtaking the other, his back curved beautifully like a strained bow, the baton in his hand slipping a little in his sweaty palms. I have to make it, he thought to himself. For a moment the figure in front of him shifted, and he thought he saw the wavering image of Ryo. He tried running faster, to overload every muscle in his body to overcome their limits, but he was too slow—_

_The vision was gone. He reached Miki. She won for them._

 

When Ryo came back he was folded right back into Ryo’s large white coat and life. The recoupling of their fates was unceremonious: it occurred factually, as if driven by nature itself. They picked up right where they left off, even though Ryo mastered things that Akira could never even dream of understanding. He was not jealous of Ryo, nor of the people Ryo must’ve met without him; rather, without effort, Akira fell back into the pattern of loving and wanting to be loved, and he understood his feelings without question. He felt a pious joy when his cheeks and neck heated up as Ryo saved him that first time, and every skip of his heart thereafter felt like a confirmation, a reward.

He liked Ryo for his honesty—there was no _let’s hang out sometime_ or _say hi to Miki for me, okay?_ from him, only glacial greetings and a sports car that would roll up beside Akira whenever he was in trouble.

Then there was the Sabbath, the lights dancing in his view so violently even in memory—

— _You defeated the devils and saved them, Ryo said._

_Akira looked at his own palms. They were hands that were able to grasp power now, hands that could wreck and protect. I’m so glad, he heard himself saying, just as he thought: I’m so glad I saved you._

There was something miraculous about the timing of his transformation. Strength seemed to burst from him just as he struggled to save Ryo. Ryo was the catalyst of his rebirth, which allowed Akira to save even more people—there had to be meaning that could be derived from this, he believed, and it gave him a secretive joy. _You are the Devilman,_ Ryo had proclaimed; those words looped in Akira’s head. Ryo was his namer, a voice in his ear, the person who broke him out of his chrysalis.

In his eyes Ryo was fragile, a small animal that must be protected; yet his shoulders also seemed broader, his stature taller, his body all the more beautiful from its disproportionate enhancements. Thinking about Ryo, he felt himself enlarge and move in unspeakable ways—he was a cub that wanted to own and be owned. Akira found ecstasy even while he was searching for release, his body lustful and his mind fertile, even as his body strained against the bottomless fissure of his desires. There was no joy greater than loving Ryo, no joy greater than the pain of loving Ryo—wasn’t this love?

 

_—Did you kill him? Ryo demanded._

_Koda had the look of someone who had died long ago. He clutched onto his necklace as Akira neared. Something inside of Akira snapped. Sorrow engulfed him._

— _I loved him, Koda told him._

— _Did you kill him yet? It’s important that you do this for me._

_Akira wiped the tears from his face._

— _Yes. He’s dead._

_Akira watched Koda escape. I loved him, he had said. Every breath he took was a gasp for air, every word spoken a hymn for punishment._

— _Good._ _There was no humanity in Ryo’s voice. Akira wasn’t sure if he knew Ryo anymore._

 

 _It isn’t love—it isn’t love!_ A cartoon character announced on TV one night when he wasn’t killing or fucking the life out of himself. In Ryo’s expansive apartment, he imagined Taro beside him, clinging onto Miki’s thigh.

 

Maybe he should’ve seen it when he saw Silene’s body embedded in Kaim’s neck, Akira thought to himself. He had monumentalized love and defiled it, and in return felt only cascading sadness. Maybe he should’ve known even earlier, when Ryo gave him that bundle of cash, like a promise tossed into the wind. He should’ve seen his love coming out of him like a deflating balloon.

He imagined how it must’ve went when his father killed his mother. He must’ve clung to the bottom of the airplane like an oversized crab—or, no, the plane would’ve crashed if he pierced its metal shell, he was probably sitting in the luggage carrier—and waited to kill his wife, shoved her head into his torso-flaps before crawling into some hangar with dry eyes. How the wife, Akira’s mother, must’ve looked then, her face full of love and dying horror. How she was still full of love when Akira shot her face, how the others’ faces were sad and happy too, human and with fluid flowing out of their nose eyes ears lips and beautiful nonetheless or even more so. In the face of this, he was at a loss. He only remembered Ryo shooting at his father’s body, his mother’s face.

 

As the insidious thought of not loving Ryo made its way to Akira’s heart, he lost sight of himself. It was as if time folded into itself and overlapped where he was, bringing with it conflicting feelings and vague impressions of a past he never had. For the first time, he had the feeling that his thoughts and his body were not his own. His life was molded to complement Ryo’s—every other thought was taboo, useless for his purpose of loving Ryo. Even loving others Miki like a chore when he was with Ryo, where the urge to consume Ryo and be consumed by him could not be disobeyed.

He pinched the side of his thigh, watching his flesh turn pale between his fingers. He pinched harder, and a whole part of it came out, dark brown beneath the yellow splatter of his blood. _I love him_ , he thought, _I can only love him now_.

He flushed the mass of flesh down the toilet. When he looked down again, the wound had healed.

 

He had thought that his love was a sweater, made slowly and steadily until he arrived at the sleeves and suddenly it was enough to warm two. He only realized his mistake after he understood that he was falling out of it: love was the yarn itself, easily spun from actions weightless like smiles or air, but at once broken and impossible to break as soon as he began picking at the frizz. It had taken him weeks to notice his ball of yarn unravelling, even if it still held its shape; he was at once in love and heartbroken, floating and sinking, and everything between those binaries.

When he first noticed it, he had held onto the orgasmic vision of love that he had built out of the two of them like a child, as if if he could just tear the stuffing from Ryo’s coats, he could find a heart strong enough to beat for them both. He pretended he could still see and feel the shimmering outline of love clinging to Ryo, even as he chanted ragged easy _I love you_ s in the dark and the syllables sagged and deflated.

He was walking on dental floss, a promise that vanished and appeared. Sometimes he was sad, and then he wasn't. Sometimes when he was out saving lives he’d see Ryo’s face on the TV screens, large and all-knowing, and for a second his knees would buckle. Sometimes he slipped right back into it, felt the weight lighten before the hurt settled in again; whenever he felt Ryo’s hands untangle his hair in the bathtub, he felt his anger to run down the drain with the blood. Even then he was still unlearning the patterns of love, its platitudes—how to smile without hurting, laugh without feeling intense violence.

It was much easier to believe that everything could go away if he pretended that it did. As his love drained out of him, a paralyzing fear ate him alive. He felt it when he slept in Ryo’s bed. He felt it when he watched Ryo clean the dishes for them, Ryo’s narrow figure moving like a trembling branch in the breeze as he worked. He felt it every time Ryo smiled at him in a way that Akira knew was fake but desperately believed to be real. He would feel it, and right then a bottomless hole would open up beneath him. In the face of this, he closed his eyes.

 

All loss, large or small, tangible or immaterial, had the same translucent quality: points in the past were alternately familiar, meaningless, elusive, and all-encompassing. Akira lost Ryo somewhere along the way of loving him. He believed that his love was unique, predestined; yet, faced with the soul-breaking silence of loss, he could only believe that all loss was the same, if only for the comfort that thought offered.

 _If everything is cliché, then: who am I now?_ And: _why does my body tell me that I love him even when I know I don't?_

 

The truth was, you either love someone or you didn’t. Every excuse people made in the name of love was pretense for not loving.

_—What can you accomplish, fighting alone? Don’t overestimate yourself. Humanity will destroy itself—why don't you just sit back and watch it happen? You can never change anything._

_Ryo looked at Akira the way he’d look at a stranger on the street. Akira wanted to throw his love for Ryo back at him. Look at all that I have done for you, all that I have felt for you in the guise of love, he wanted say, laying all that was unbidden and secret between them. This is how much you meant to me. He imagined gripping the sides of his body and ripping it open, exposing his pulsing entrails for examination. This much._

_At the same time, Akira wanted to destroy Ryo: he felt an urge to shred Ryo’s white shirt, to tear out his neck with his teeth, to crack open his rib cage in half, to be inside of Ryo, licking at his heart, to make him cry, to make him see that it was Akira who tore him up from the inside. From his throat comes a muffled whimper._

— _Humans wont self-destruct. We won’t self-destruct. I’m not the only one; there are others who have conquered their demons. I’m going to gather the other Devilmen. Together we’ll fight the demons._

— _No. That’s not why I made you into a Devilman! Ryo was shouting._

_Just like that, his faith shattered. The crowning belief that Ryo gave him purpose, that love was worth it, was perverted beyond recognition. What was before him was someone so corrupted by his own hubris that he was less of a person than a rotten shell of one, so utterly consumed by himself that he could not see what was before him._

_Was this his plan all along?  To manipulate him under the guise of companionship?_

— _Get out of my way, Ryo! He screamed._

_For a moment, Ryo stood his ground defiantly. In a moment of self-abandon, Akira wanted him to stay there, upset and angry; yet, as quickly as Ryo’s anger came, it left him, and he backed away, his hands held in a surrendering position. I would’ve loved you forever if you tried, Akira thought. There was no rage in him; overcame by an unnamable emptiness, he looked at Ryo for a long while, dazed. Then he turned and left._

_The door clicked shut behind him. He had left. He had walked away from Ryo._

 

…

Ryo hovers above ground some miles away, his dozen wings beating in unison. He wears a prideful smile. Miki is dead, as is her family, as is Miko, as is her family. So are the Devilmen who had gladly torn every limb from their body for his disposal.

The world is engaged in the act of self-annihilation—lovers kill their lovers, friends ostracize their friends, families crush their families. Demons are killed by Devilmen. To Akira, there’s just him and Ryo now, flesh and energy with wills. They’re both panting. Fight is not a dance, even if poets lie about it to fit a rhyme; fight is savagery, a contest between raw power and the limitations of the body. Akira knows he’s losing.

He manages to land a solid blow on Ryo. Before the wound heals, Akira sees the outline of his fist on the other side of the impact, right behind Ryo’s shoulders. It looks like a heart.

 _I still love him_ , he thinks, and the realization makes his knees buckle. He is a fraud, a being no less good than he is monstrous, a Devilman but a devil nonetheless. In the end, he cannot outrun the mysterious forces that jerk him around, even if his very spirit cries against it.

Ryo emits a flash of light. Akira watches as it nears him. He is struck by a feeling between bravery and sadness… he does not move. He begins humming. It almost sounds like a hymn—

**Author's Note:**

> If you're interested in how love functions and dysfunctions, check out Fleshgraphs, the first Ryo-centric entry in this series.  
> If you're interested in talking to a lonely emo my twitter is @soozakoo I do not have friends  
> Quotation marks? Never heard of her


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